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would it be a good idea to do this, ya know make your site out for ie and if it doesnt work out the way you want in netscape so what. I'm sick of netscape really i do a mouseover or something looks great in ie then i click the netscape button and its all yucky

For instance I use CSS mouse overs all the time. NS 4.x does not support this, and I don't care because they are a small percentage of the browser market and NS 6 does support it so its only a matter of time.

On the other hand sometimes my tables that look fine in IE look horrible in NS. I do fix this because I still want NS people to be able to use and see my site, I just don't care if they don't have all the bells and whistles.

Have you ever considered that maybe you're (and that isn't directed at you personally, rather at everyone who's lamented NS here recently) approaching the whole thing backwards?

Every motivational speaker you'll ever listen to will tell you that you have to work to the lowest common denominator to successfully reach your goals.

Rather than designing for all the "bells and whistles" (IE) first and trying to make it work in a less capable browser (NS), why not design for the lesser capablilties of NS and when that works add the bells and whistles for the IE crowd?

You don't start building a skyscraper on the 32nd floor, you start in the basement and work your way up. Obviously you aren't going to build two versions of the same building, but you could easily build two versions of your site.

Is it more work? Sure, but it's easier this way than pulling all your hair out trying to adapt "bells and whistles" to a "meat and potatoes" browser.

I use to keep my sites very simple with just HTML, pics and some SSI tags. DreamWeaver does the tables, and they always work perfectly in NS. Some fancy stuff, like colored table borders don't work in NS, I 'discovered', but I found another way to solve that problem.

Most of those 'bells and whistles' are just useless, those mouse-over scripts for example, what's the use of it?

K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid <-The best advice IMHO

I think that a good site isn't defined by the look of it, but by the way it looks in multiple browsers on multiple platforms, how fast it loads and whether it's userfriendly or not.

Its best to not use WYSIWYG editors as these always mess up your code.

I've managed to make netscape view my web site design properly, like Internet Explorer.
One thing. If you use Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ), make sure you use separate style sheets. Netscape doesn't support some of the CSS1 elements. Like height, etc.
Also, if there's a sudden big gap and your have no idea whats wrong, check your style sheet. If you used any paddings, remove it.
To maintain browser compatibility with Internet Explorer 4.0 and above, Netscape 4.0 generation browsers, Netscape 6 Previews and Mozilla Milestones, use Style Sheets.

On top of checking your design with Netscape 4 browsers and Internet Explrer 4.0 and above, make sure you check it with Mozilla and Netscape 6. They are a upcoming browsers and many will switch to that. So make sure your design works with future browsers ( at least the next version =) )

My site uses only 3 browser detection scripts for a quite complex design.
1 is for a navigation as it involves CSS1 mouse which mouseovers with netscape doesn't support and another which is just to disable elements like Default Home Page and Add Bookmark as ( only IE supports ). The last is to specfy which style sheet to use.